W*****B 发帖数: 4796 | 1 床铺螳臂当车,白人成为少民已是大势所趋。美国即使现在完全停止移民,白人最终也
将成为少民。只是时间早晚问题。
ANALYSIS
President Trump's proposal to cut legal immigration rates would
delay the date that white Americans become a minority of the population by
160;as few as one or as many as five additional years,
according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
The plan, released by the White House last month, would scale back a
program that allows people residing in the United States to sponsor family
members living abroad for green cards, and would eliminate the “diversity
visa program” that benefits immigrants in countries with historically low
levels of migration to the United States. Together, the changes would
disproportionately affect immigrants from Latin America and Africa.
The Census Bureau projects that minority groups will outnumber non-Hispanic
whites in the United States in 2044. The Post's analysis
projects that, were Trump's plan to be carried out, the date would
be between 2045 and 2049, depending on how parts of it are implemented.
(The Post's methodology for estimating the annual impact of Trump's
proposed cuts is explained in more detail at the bottom of this story.
Projecting this far into the future entails certain assumptions that could
alter the range, but demographic experts said The Post's approach was
reasonable.)
All told, the proposal could cut off entry for more than 20 million
160;legal immigrants over the next four decades. The change could have
profound effects on the size of the U.S. population and its
composition, altering projections for economic growth and the age of the
nation's workforce, as well as shaping its politics and culture,
demographers and immigration experts say.
“By greatly slashing the number of Hispanic and black African immigrants
entering America, this proposal would reshape the future United States.
Decades ahead, many fewer of us would be nonwhite or have nonwhite
people in our families,” said Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center
for Global Development, a think tank that has been critical of the proposal.
“Selectively blocking immigrant groups changes who America is. This is the
biggest attempt in a century to do that.”
Trump's plan calls for eliminating all family-based visa programs that
are not used for sponsoring either minors or spouses. That means several
family-based visa programs — including those that allow sponsorship for
siblings, adult parents and adult children — would be canceled. It
also calls for the elimination of the diversity visa lottery and the
reallocation of its 50,000 visas to reduce the number of immigrants already
on a backlog and to go to a new visa based on “merit.”
The Post analyzed a low-end and high-end estimate for cuts to legal
immigration under the Trump plan. The low-end estimate, provided by Numbers
USA, a group that favors limiting immigration, suggests that about 300,000
fewer immigrants will be admitted legally on an annual basis. A high-end
estimate from the Cato Institute, which favors immigration, suggests that as
many as 500,000 fewer immigrants would be admitted. Cato bases its number,
in part, on assumptions that more family visa categories will be cut.
Last August, Trump endorsed a Senate bill written by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark
.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) that would cut legal immigration levels by
close to 500,000 people annually, according to estimates by the bill's
authors. The White House has not released estimates of its own
plan.
If Trump's plan is not implemented, the white share of the population is
expected to fall from above 60 percent in 2018 to below 45 percent in 2060,
as the light green lines in the chart below show. The teal
lines show The Post's lower estimates of the impact of Trump's
proposal, in which whites stay the majority group until 2046. The brown
lines show the upper bound of the potential impact of Trump's proposal.
Get the Post Most Newsletter
The daily must-reads, delivered to your inbox every morning.
To its defenders, the White House proposal offers a reasonable compromise.
Trump would move the United States to an immigration system based
less on bringing families together or encouraging diversity and more on
bringing in those with skills that contribute to the economy. (He also
proposes protecting about 1.8 million young immigrants known as “dreamers”
in exchange for a significant boost to funding for border enforcement and a
border wall.)
“It is time to begin moving toward a merit-based immigration system —
one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will
contribute to our society, and who will love and respect our country,”
Trump said in his State of the Union address last week.
But by reducing the country's overall population, the plan could
eventually reduce the overall growth rate of the U.S. economy. Under
Trump's plan, the U.S. economy could be more than $1 trillion
smaller than it would have been two decades from now. That's largely
because the economy would have fewer workers.
The plan could also raise the median age of U.S. workers. About
160;4 of every 5 immigrants is projected to be under the age of 40
, while only half of the country's overall population is that young,
according to Census Bureau data. A demographic crunch is already
expected because of millions of upcoming retirements from the aging “baby
boomer” generation, raising concerns about the long-term solvency of
programs such as Social Security and Medicare that rely on worker
contributions.
The plans could have long-term ramifications for the United States
' political system, given that about 54 percent of all
immigrants are naturalized within 10 years and thus able to vote,
although naturalization rates vary widely based on immigrants'
country of origin, according to the latest data from U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services.
Hispanic immigrants who are registered voters favor Democrats over
Republicans by a 70-to-18 margin, and registered voters who are Asian
immigrants favor Democrats by a 50-to-33 margin, according to the most
recent data available from the Pew Research Center. (Similar data was not
available for African immigrants.) Approximately 78 percent of
immigrants from Africa and 65 percent of immigrants from Asia were
naturalized within 10 years.
But while these effects of delaying the United States'
diversification would be significant, they would not fundamentally change
the country's demographic destiny. Experts say the main driver
;of diversification in the United States is the native-born Hispanic
population, which grew by about 5 million from 2010 to 2016, just as
the native-born white population shrank by about 400,000 over the same
period, according to Census Bureau data.
Among young Americans, the share of the non-Hispanic white population is
already under 60 percent — a number that falls close to 50
percent among newborns and toddlers.
“You can shut the door to everyone in the world and that won’t change,”
160;said Roberto Suro, an immigration and demography expert at the
University of Southern California. “The president can’t do anything about
that. If your primary concern is that the American population is becoming
less white, it’s already too late.”
But if Trump's plan were put in place, many of the family
immigrants who would eventually be exposed to the cuts come from Latin
America. In fiscal year 2017, about 28,000 Mexicans received family-based
visas, with immigrants from Asia receiving almost 90,000 and immigrants from
Central America and the Caribbean receiving more than 60,000, according to
State Department data.
The changes to legal immigration could vary widely depending on
unforeseeable events, including increased economic development in Asian and
African countries, dislocation caused by climate change, or decisions made
by future administrations.
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution,
produced a separate estimate of the impact of Trump's proposed cut
to legal immigration. He found that the plan would delay the arrival of a “
minority-majority” nation by three years, to 2047, and stressed that his
projections were the best possible with the publicly available information.
Another big factor is what happens to the population of roughly 11 million
undocumented immigrants, including the “dreamers,” in the country.
The Post's calculations (like the Census Bureau's) assume they will
stay. But their future status is unresolved, and if any significant
number of them are forced to leave the country, it could push back the
minority-majority date as well.
“The President has laid out a reasonable framework that addresses the key
security issues identified by the frontline men and women” of the
Department of Homeland Security, said Tyler Houlton, an agency spokesman, in
a statement. “It secures the borders and ensures we can remove those we
apprehend, including criminal aliens. It also seeks to protect nuclear
family migration while ending two problematic visa programs that do not meet
the economic or security needs of the country.”
Trump's proposal is unlikely to be implemented in its current form.
;It requires congressional approval, and Democratic leadership opposes it.
Advocates of reducing legal immigration have offered a variety of
arguments, with some saying that high levels of low-skilled
immigration hurt U.S.-born workers and new legal immigrants by increasing
competition and depressing wages. They also say that today's levels of
immigration are high by historical standards.
“These historically high levels of legal immigration only date back a few
decades,” said Chris Chmielenski, director of content and activism at
NumbersUSA. “The numbers we've seen recently are abnormal, and Trump
39;s proposal would eventually return us closer to historical levels.”
Immigration advocates say that the percentage of the foreign-born
population has been higher at several points in U.S. history, even if
the overall number of incoming immigrants has increased. Looking at the
share of the population, which accounts for overall population growth,
recent levels of legal immigration appear roughly in line with historical
averages, with a decrease after World War II an outlier, according to
Migration Policy Institute statistics.
“Recent immigration flows have been a small fraction of historical levels,
” said Clemens, of the Center for Global Development.
Others who favor immigration restrictions have pointed to the necessity
of reducing what they call the social disruption of high levels of
immigration, which strikes some liberal critics as code for keeping the
United States' white population in the majority.
“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” Rep.
Steve King (R-Iowa), an immigration restrictionist in Congress, said on
Twitter last year.
One of the biggest unknowns is how long new immigrants will identify as
racial minorities.
Some academics, as Duke professor William Darity Jr. wrote in the
American Prospect, argue that many Latino immigrants “identify
less as Hispanic and more as non-Hispanic white” the longer they stay in
160;the United States — a phenomenon similar to the absorption of
;Irish and Italian immigrants into the idea of “whiteness.”
Other demographers say a real and important shift is underway, with
important consequences for U.S. politics. They note that many
Hispanics already identify as white and yet still vote like a minority
group. “The contention that [Hispanics] will think of themselves as white
in the future is unsettled,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress and author of a book about how demographic
changes will affect U.S. politics. “It definitely seems like they’re
a different breed of cat.”
But perhaps the most lasting impact of Trump's policies would be
not to America but to the millions of immigrants from poor and
developing countries whom the United States would be denying entry to,&
#160;said Angélica Cházaro, a law professor at the University of
Washington who specializes in questions of immigration .
“We’re talking about susceptibility to pain and violence and economic
and social instability for millions of black and brown people,” Cházaro
160;said. “ People have organized their lives around the possibility of
legal immigration, and this forecloses that route.”
Methodology
In 2014, the Census Bureau projected the U.S. population by race,
ethnicity, sex, age and nativity. Those projections, the most recent
available, are the basis for the prediction that the country will become “
majority minority” in 2044.
To adjust those forecasts, we assumed cuts of between 300,000 and 500,000
per year, and we assumed the cuts would be applied proportionally to each
race and ethnicity based on their forecast representation in the immigrant
population. The 300,000 estimate from NumbersUSA comes from projections
of the Trump administration's plan to cut several kinds of family-based
immigration visas — those for siblings (65,000 visas annually), those for
adult children (another 50,000) and those for adult parents of immigrants (
another 125,000). NumbersUSA also projects a 55,000 reduction in annual
visas awarded from the elimination of the diversity visa lottery.
The high estimate of Trump's proposal found by the Cato Institute
starts with all of the cuts found by NumbersUSA. But Cato also says
160;that other family-based visa programs are likely to be cut under Trump
39;s plan. For instance, Cato says a program for visas for children of
noncitizens will be cut, because a Senate proposal similar to the White
House framework eliminates it. That accounts for an additional 95,000 fewer
visas annually between the groups' projections. Cato also projects the
annual impact of cutting visas for adult parents will be far greater than
NumbersUSA does, because Cato looked at the number of these visas awarded in
2016, whereas NumbersUSA took a 10-year average of these visas. That
accounts for an additional difference of 50,000.
We projected children whom the lost immigrants would have had based on
Census Bureau estimates of their female population of childbearing age, plus
Pew Research projections of first-generation immigrant fertility by race
and origin. In some cases, when it was the only data available, we used
Census Bureau figures for “black only” and “Asian only” as a rough
analog for “black, non-Hispanic” and “Asian, non-Hispanic.” Other groups
were treated similarly.
The Census Bureau made no distinction between documented and
undocumented immigrants. Our estimates include only the policy's direct
effect on legal immigration, but our models of the race, age and sex of
immigrants are based on the full immigrant population. We found that more-
complicated models produced similar results.
We arrived at rough estimates of GDP growth by comparing our
predictions for the country's entire population under various
scenarios with forecasts of per-person economic output by PwC, a global
consulting firm. The estimates don't account for how the exclusion
of certain groups of immigrants would change the overall age, education and
skill level of the labor force.
Jeff Stein covers policy for Wonkblog
Andrew Van Dam covers data and economics. He previously did similar work for
the Wall Street Journal, and dissimilar work for the Boston Globe and the
Idaho Press-Tribune.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
© 1996-2017 The Washington Post |
|